I was at McDonald's with my mom and sister when it happened. My first internet money(9 freaking dollars$$$) Well, not exactly. I'd just left them to go home and work. It was around 9pm. I open my laptop and there's an email. Someone paid for my product. $9.10. My first ever paying customer. After 3 years of failing. I genuinely thought it was a test notification at first. I test everything constantly so I get those all the time. But this one was different. It wasn't me. It didn't have [Sandbox] written in the title. It wasn't my email. It was real. I couldn't believe it. I started trying to indie hack in April 2023, right after I finished university. I'd just read about @levelsio a solo founder making $1M+ a year building software products. Something in my brain just switched. I looked at the job market waiting for me here in Portugal. 1,000€/month. And I thought: I don't want this. I want freedom. Geographic, financial, all of it. I want my mom to stop working as hard as she has her whole life. So I started building. And I failed. A lot. Built SaaS that went nowhere. Pivoted. Killed projects that didn't make sense. Eventually went into freelancing (SEO/CRO for local businesses and SaaS) just to make money and that's actually where I found the pain point that became vitelnk vitelnk is a way to share videos with prospects so you can book more meetings and close more deals. I cold email businesses, send them a personalized video audit, and actually see when they watch it and for how long so I can follow up at the right moment. Private links, disable downloads, email-gating, pretty much everything you need. Stuff other platforms just didn't have. A few months in, almost 2,000 visitors. 57 users(some were my test accounts) . 83% bounce rate. And $0. Then I rebuilt my entire landing page! Stopped talking about how great my app is and started talking about their actual problems. Focused on their pain (which I found with my own research and leadverse a tool by @jakubmuzzik that allows me to get information on potential buyers pain points they face with other tools and features they need) and the benefits of using video to secure more meetings. Days later, the email came in. I don't even fully know how she or he idk… found me. I built an analytics tool and STILL hadn't wired up the revenue tracking properly. No idea where she/he came from. Doesn't matter. They saw the value even without fully trying the product and bought a sub. Most indie hackers never get here. I've watched founders come and go on this app for years because they couldn't get a single one. And now I did. It's $9. It's nothing. But it's everything. I want more. I need more. And I'm not stopping. Would you?

oops i built something like a tiny chaos engine, and i need your help to test it out with outliked — vitelnk.com is live, and every like here decides the rank of this announcement. if you vibe, drop a like and help me climb. outlike.lol/?via=vitelnk.com

Another sale!! That's 2 sales in less than a month First sales took 3 years 2nd sale took 1 month after the first 🚀🚀

YouTube has just become my secondary main channel after SEO 😬 Why? I've been posting on a less than 10-day-old created channel, and I am already getting users from it 🚀🚀

The stats behind landing the first paying customer for my B2B SaaS, Vitelnk: • 1.9k visitors • 600 real sessions (excluding bots & crawlers) • 55 registered users (9.2% signup rate) • 1 paying customer (1.8% visitor-to-customer conversion) This was all before major changes to my ICP targeting, my onboarding rework... A reminder that SaaS growth starts small. The first customer is validation that someone is willing to pay for the problem you're solving. What do you think?

vitelnk no longer has a no CC required trial Now it's 14 days trial, but CC upfront I completely revamped my onboarding with an option to get a big discount if you skip the trial and go for the yearly pro plan Let's see how this converts Will post everything about this experiment on my YouTube channel

Tell me why aren't you using youtube as a marketing channel? Less than 1 week of posting on a fresh channel

one day these won't have [Sandbox] on them

Standing desk yay or nay?

My philosophy for my saas products growth going forward is simple: 🍽️ marketing eats first(take on camera eats first) Boring stuff done first then I allow myself to do some coding

Here's my youtube channel stack -Osmo pocket 3 for camera and the mic -@descript for recording/editing - complete game changer for me 10x my output and made it fun to edit videos -me and discipline -Canva/figma for thumbnails -Claude for scripts I think it's paying off

What do you think? Does YouTube have potential for B2B marketing?

Just recorded 6 videos today 2 youtube videos and 4 onboarding videos 💪🏾💪🏾 I finnaly cracked content creation and it starting to take off

Enough fun, back to marketing 📈

are you even doing youtube if your gallery doesn't look like this?

got banned on reddit 🤨😭 worst part is my comments promoting my saas are gone...

I've been shipping a lot of updates to my internal analytics to: Get the insights I need to start converting the traffic I'm getting with vitelnk into actual users/customers. Been using it for both SaaS and the local business I run. This tool is super focused on marketing, not just boring data.

Just shipped automated smoke tests that run on every deploy for @vitelnksocial. After too many times where a small change broke video uploads silently... It works with a real file, a real R2 upload, real FFmpeg processing, all verified before users ever see the new version. If it fails, the deploy stops. Simple as that.